[The Girl From UNCLE 01] - The Global Globules Affair - Latter Simon - Страница 11

He landed, cat-like, rolled several times to give his body impetus and any marksman a difficult target, then scrabbled to his feet and raced for the trees. He went deep among them to a small clearing with paths leading across it and sat beside a bush, gulping in air. Once his breath was under control he pulled out his communicator and called up Paris H.Q.

"Channel D—Channel D. Hear me. Kazan, helicopter, in woods north about twenty kilometers from Monte Carlo. Chopper damaged. Am making my way to a road. Will contact when clear of woods." Suddenly he saw movements glinting among the trees. Movements from all sides of him. He watched them come closer and closer until they ringed him with a circle of shimmering metal-clad forms.

"Mon Dieu!" said Kazan. "Rush me also a can opener—I am surrounded by canned goods! Over and out."

CHAPTER FIVE: THE PLUS FACTOR

DARTMOOR rain has a quality all its own. There is Dartmoor fog, and Dartmoor mist, and Dartmoor haze. Low cloud sweeping over the tors often will provide a mixture of all four, giving areas of sheets of penetrating rain over the highest points. On the slopes these will produce a form of fog—actually a whitish shroud of miniscule moisture globules which lies on clothing, hair, beards or eyebrows in tiny quivering haloes.

In the depressions and hollows and over the rare level areas of ground this becomes a fairy mist—light, gossamer, and cruelly unreliable. It will caress you damply one minute, give a glowing effect around you, causing an illusion of sunshine about to burst through the clouds. The next minute you are lost and stumbling through a thick grey wall. Then, according to your proximity to a tor, the wind direction and force, it will speed away, allowing you to discover you should have been on a track somewhere else. As you hurry towards another path, thankful for deliverance, the fairy mist swoops up behind you, to again wrap you in its ghostie embrace.

You forge ahead in a straight line, not realizing that one of the most joyous results of being caught in it is that you immediately walk in a circle. You usually discover this when you sink oozily in a patch of bog, or break your leg in fissure or over a rock. For the walker caught on Dartmoor in such conditions there is one golden rule—don't. Don't walk, don't move. Stay put.

The so-called enlightened Victorians knew all about Dartmoor. They knew and appreciated its wild beauty, its sweep of purple-gold, undulating to the serene summer horizon. Here, a man could walk free with only the sky and the wheeling hawks above him, the heather beneath his feet, the shy ballet dance of gamboling sheep over the hillside, and the tumbling streams, fish-laden, joyously bubbling. Which is why they built a massive grey granite prison to house the most desperate of their criminals here on Dartmoor.

There are more houses now, but the prison still stands, the moors and quarries around it—an ugly, monstrous excrement of a monument to the glory of justice and retribution so beloved by those who built it. Occasionally some prisoners escape. A few have succeeded in breaking out of the moor itself, and reaching towns. But mostly they run from working parties outside the prison, seeking shelter in the fairy mist which proves to be a more unholy prison than the grey granite walls. Many are only too glad to be recaptured. Some die—lonely and afraid in the sibilant silence of the rain and mist—or lie wracked with pneumonia after falling into the river Dart—from which the moor is named—and slowly collapse in the shivering mist.

April Dancer had read a lot about Dartmoor. In her student days she had visited the prison as part of her studies on criminal codes, patterns and behaviors as well as to aid her work on a social science degree. She could, in fact, have told Dr. Karadin a lot about Dartmoor. She'd stayed in at least three of the villages and hiked over its tors from each direction, as she also had done on Exmoor—a northerly range of hills and moors edged by the Bristol Channel. So she wondered why Karadin and the obviously wealthy organization behind him had chosen a house on Dartmoor as a research base.

Remoteness, quietness, away from prying eyes and gossiping mouths—those were reasonable factors; but were offset by the conditions of climate, time taken to reach town centers and London, and the normal difficulties of provisioning and communications, for in the very bad winters many parts of Dartmoor are cut off. Yet, she reasoned, organizations calculate all factors and their decisions are reached on the plus factor. What was the plus factor of Moorfell? If her own hunch was right, the climate itself could be this plus factor.

For that matter, why England at all? Karadin was French. Wouldn't he know of many isolated places in France? April Dancer had not yet received sufficient proof that THRUSH was the organization back of Karadin, but there were pointers which made her feel it safer to assume that this—whatever it was—had all the mark of a THRUSH project. And THRUSH had the world to choose from. She didn't believe for one moment that research into air pollution was Dr. Karadin's sole purpose in England. The British were well aware of their own air-pollution problems. Still, they might welcome Karadin and grant him certain facilities—such as permits to obtain drugs or chemicals needed for research, or to smooth the way a little by allowing a helicopter to land and take off near his base.

April had long since given up trying to analyze hunches which, in the past, had saved her life or that of a companion. She was aware that it was illogical and against the concepts of her training, but when these hunches were linked to fact they had previously been proved valid. It was too early for full understanding of the forces at work, and why, but with out doubt there was a tie-up between Carnaby Street, Karadin and incidents in America and Paris.

She had another hunch that Mark Slate would be discovering other links through the over-obvious attachment of Suzanne. April had knowledge that the vast network of U.N.C.L.E. was now following up her early reports, so that from a purely personal endeavor she now was on an assignment. She stepped from the helicopter, calmly dignified, having shed her Miss Babbling Tourist character and freed herself of the uncomfortable sticking plaster.

"I'm so glad I got to you." She smiled sweetly at Karadin. "Up to the moment when you pulled a gun on me and struck me with it, you were, as far as I'm concerned, completely within the law. Now you're guilty of assault with a deadly weapon, assault upon the person and detention by force. You're really not very bright are you?"

"Your trick was more clever than you think." He guided her towards the car. "My wife was a virago, a screaming shrew who babbled and screeched until she wore me out. So I am particularly vulnerable on that score. But I do not believe any great harm has been done. Once inside Moorfell you would have discovered you were a prisoner. Your torment of me merely caused that knowledge to be advanced."

They entered a closed car. The two attendants squeezed on to small occasional seats facing them. They were swarthy, impassive men.

"Manou and Greco," said Karadin. "Nice fellows, unless you upset them. They look like brothers but are not."

"You have some funny types working for you," said April. "Almost as if you expected prisoners."

"All secret projects must have a security force. I have overriding authority, but it is not strictly my affair. Once I hand you over to Sirdar's department, I am free of you."

"Sirdar the Turk?" said April. "I thought these two play mates looked familiar. Although you see their breed in every country. They all look as if they had the same mother—or perhaps I mean father?"